Former senator says she will decide early next year

FRIDAY, Aug. 5 — Former state Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing, expects to decide by the end of March if she will seek the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018.

“I’m seriously considering running and I would anticipate making some sort of decision by the first quarter of next year,” said Whitmer, appearing on “City Pulse Newsmakers.”

Whitmer is serving as the interim Ingham County prosecutor till Jan. 1. She was the Democratic Senate leader until term limits ended her legislative career last year.

She said she thought 14 years in elective office was enough, but she is so discouraged by conditions in Michigan that she is thinking of running for governor.

“I look around at the state that my girls are growing up in and sometimes it doesn’t even resemble the one in which I was raised,” she said. “We used to be leaders in public education. We used to have infrastructure that would move us around safely but move us forward. People could afford to get a degree after high school because we saw that as a benefit to us and we subsidized all of the tuition to 75 percent. Now it’s lopsided, it’s a college tax.

“We’ve been lulled into accepting mediocrity,” she added. “Everyone has had a tough eight years” under Republican Gov. Rick Snyder. Besides education, she criticized his “phony road bill” and predicted “big financial problems” because of Republican opposition to federal Medicaid funding after 2020.

The TV show with Whitmer will be available today at www.lansingcitypulse.com. It airs at 7:30 tonight on Comcast Channel 16 in Lansing and at 10:30 tomorrow morning on MY18.